From Simon Lipscomb, author of Winter Wonderland and Mountains of Ket: February 22nd, 2006 I see you have the garbled history of Winter Wonderland on your site that seems to get passed around with the solution! It was in fact written by Tim Walsha and myself, and published by Incentive Software in 1986 (*not* U.S. Gold!). Incentive published a few Graphic Adventure Creator games in a "Gold Medal" range, which may have confused the original author of the intro. It was in fact the first GAC adventure ever written, although Apache Gold was published slightly ahead of ours because the artwork took longer to come through. We wrote it on a pre-production copy of the GAC after wandering into the Incentive offices (at that time in Reading) and chatting with Ian Andrew (the boss) and Sean Ellis (the programmer). The original version was released for the Amstrad CPC, as was the GAC. When the GAC was converted to other formats we ported the game across to Spectrum, C64 and BBC Micro. Actually, the BBC version is slightly better since we had to re-program it due to there being less memory, and so eliminated some of less effective parts (like the fact that you can wear about 5 types of footwear simultaneously in the other versions). My background: Originally, Tim and I designed a load of adventure games using a framework written in BASIC, being the teenage role-playing geeks that we were. When we dropped into the offices of Incentive and displayed our keenness to write, Ian Andrew gave us some promotional pictures that had been made to show of the GAC's graphic capability, and asked if we could write something based upon them. The trouble was, the pictures used up most of the available memory, and didn't have an obvious uniting theme. We said we'd have a go and instead wrote up one of our BASIC adventures in GAC. Sean Ellis gave it a review and liked it, so we went ahead with that instead. We also wrote the Amstrad conversion of Mountains of Ket via GAC, for which we had to encode the combat system making weird use of rooms and variables. But then we started 6th form college and gave up the games for 'A'-Levels. I don't know what became of Sean, but Tim and I are still in regular contact. We were commissioned by Ian to write a game based upon this book - [Frank Oliver's] Axe: A Tale of Carthelion - which was some awful fantasy in a vanity-publisher imprint. We came up with quite a good engine allowing for switching between characters, and mass army combat (the idea was to have something a la Lords of Midnight or, indeed, Lord of the Rings, where one character follows the mass warfare path and the other is involved in a 'get rid of the ring' type of quest). Several factors counted against it ever seeing the light of day though - we only had 32K to play with, meaning it would have to be multi-part to make it worthwhile; we just didn't have the time anymore and the book was really bad! Winter got mostly good reviews (the BBC version got a particularly glowing report in BBC Micro User, and the Spectrum version was 1% away from a Crash Smash. Zzap 64 didn't think much of the C64 version, however). Personally, there are things in it that would annoy me as a gamer - there is a chance of sudden death at the start, and few decisions are irreversible, but these were almost de rigeur in those days. I've often considered resurrecting it as a Flash or VB-based game, but the time restraints come into play once again.